RESOURCES

LumenVox Offers Speech Recognition as a Subscription

(OCT 2009) — We're excited to offer the next evolution of the LumenVox Speech Recognition Engine
— our Speech Recognition as a Subscription product. It provides cloud–based licensing services for a monthly fee.

Software as a Subscription is a method of procuring computing resources via an Internet connection. Instead of
hosting the software on your machine, you let someone else host it and simply connect to it when you need it.

Using the Subscription model for your computing services can be beneficial in several ways, in that it can:

Save you in time spent setting up your system's hardware and software.

Cut down on startup costs.

Gain you access to the latest technologies, with less learning curve in adopting them.

Allow you to focus your business on its core competencies, rather than managing new resources.

Reduces Costs for Proof–of–Concept Applications

Users often ask speech vendors to develop a mockup of a speech application while the vendor is bidding on the project.
This makes sense — prospects want to see that their desired speech application could work, and that the vying
contractor has the know–how to deliver the goods.

This is even more common when a telephony developer is new to writing speech applications. Many times, since they're
braving uncharted waters, they want to prove to their clients and to themselves that they can deliver on their promises.

In order to develop a speech application, you need to have some Speech Engine licenses to run it.
Purchasing licenses to develop a test or demo application can be expensive, especially if you haven't yet secured the business.

This is where having our Subscription–based solution comes in handy. Instead of purchasing one or a few licenses outright,
you can now simply rent them from LumenVox.

While it's never a bad idea to have a few extra speech recognition licenses lying around, taking advantage of a
subscription system like ours allows you to get the licenses you need, without having to purchase them outright.

Allows for Scalability

Another area where the logic of Subscription–based licensing works well is scalability. You may have an application
where traffic to it will increase tenfold, rather suddenly. Think of a retail application around the holidays, or a registration
system after the announcement of a new promotion.

Rather than purchasing two or three times your normally required number of licenses for a temporary burst of activity, you
can now simply purchase as many subscriptions as you'll need ahead of time.

Enables Virtualization

As developers seek ways to reduce overhead, and move towards smaller environments to manage, one of the more popular methods
to do so is to virtualize the systems they're running their solutions on.

Virtualization refers to the ability to emulate one or several computer environments on a single machine. Through it, you
can simultaneously run different operating systems. Developers are relying on this technology more and more often to maximize
the productivity of a single machine.

Historically, LumenVox has not supported virtualized systems, because our license files require the capture of hardware
information about the system they're being installed on.

Now, with our Speech Recognition as a Service model, LumenVox manages all of those licenses, on our servers. This enables you
to install our Speech Engine on your virtual machine and point it to our license servers. As long as you have sufficient resources
dedicated to the Speech Engine on your virtual server, you should have no problems.

Turns Capital Expenditures into Operating Expenses

Another problem, similar to the challenges in passing purchase costs on to a customer, is in selling those same costs to your
accounting department. Since one of the basic functions of any company is to turn a profit, it often has to reduce any expenses
that it can.

One of the most easily targeted costs is capital expenditure. These are purchases of new assets, or those that are intended to
increase the company's scope of operation. Speech licenses more likely fall under the latter categorization.

They usually represent the up–front cost of purchasing something, and are later amortized, or paid off, month–by–month.
The simple fact is that the total price of any new purchase is often less appetizing than its monthly payment amount.

Presenting the monthly cost of the speech licenses as a fraction of their retail value should result in easier budget approval
within your organization. What's more, many accounting personnel prefer to have assets listed as operational expenses, as it makes
for easier annual budgeting.

How It Works

Using our Speech Recognition as a Subscription solution is easy. Simply contact LumenVox Sales by calling us at
+1–858–707–7700, or Contact Us.

Our subscription model allows an unlimited number of words to be recognized at a time (technical limitations may restrict the
number of words to around 40,000 at a time).

When you sign up for our Subscription licensing, we will charge you for the first full month of the subscription service, plus a
charge to account for the prorated number of days until that next full month starts. We bill on the 25th, so if you purchase on
the 15th, we'll charge your Credit Card for the 10 days left in the month, plus the following month. After that, we will charge
your card for the flat monthly fee on each 25th.

It's also worth mentioning again that there are no additional fees or commitments. In fact, we've even included the cost of our
annual software maintenance in the monthly price. So with your subscription, you're entitled to all of the latest versions of products.

If you do not need some of your licenses the following month, just call us and let us know how many of your subscription
licenses you'd like to cancel. We'll remove them from the next billing cycle.

Pointing your speech engine to our license server is just a matter of editing your client configuration file, and ensuring that
you have an internet connection to your client. We have help documentation on the process
here.

It should be mentioned that as is the case with any Subscription solution, the service is only as good as the internet connection to it.
If your client loses connectivity to our license server, your callers are not going to be able to get decodes from the engine.
Having a few extra locally installed standard licenses will mitigate against this happening.